The jury that convicted the accused in the Boston Marathon bombing was biased before the trial even started, a wave of suicides is sweeping through a town in California and an activist works toward getting women to “free the nipple.” These discoveries and more after the jump.

Prosecutors point to a torn-up note from a doctor as evidence that the copilot who killed himself and 149 other people when he crashed a commercial jet into the French Alps on Tuesday suffered from an illness.

Screenwriter Graham Moore revealed a surprising fact about himself during his Oscar acceptance speech on Sunday night, paid tribute to computer science pioneer Alan Turing and offered encouragement to “that kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different.”

In response to a vulnerable personal comment on “nerd trauma and male privilege” published by MIT professor Scott Aaronson, New Statesman editor and columnist Laurie Penny wrote a compassionate and highly desirable essay on the experiences of pain, frustration and loneliness common to both nerdy males and females in general.

Having infuriated millions of Robin Williams fans with insensitive remarks on the late actor’s suicide, Rush Limbaugh now blames the “liberal media” and “despicable leftists” for distorting his innocent message.

A 33-year-old JPMorgan employee jumped to his death from the roof of the firm’s Hong Kong headquarters Tuesday, adding to a series of untimely deaths in the banking and big business arena in recent weeks.

Russell Investments chief economist Mike Dueker’s apparent suicide death, discovered Thursday after the 50-year-old former St. Louis Federal Reserve officer had been reported missing from his home in Tacoma, Washington, became the fourth such loss in the financial community in the span of a week.

Three teens who admitted to attacking and photographing an unconscious 15-year-old girl have been sentenced to mere days in a California juvenile detention center while their victim hanged herself eight days after the assault.

A study for the Prince’s Trust charity reports that almost a third of long-term unemployed people have contemplated killing themselves and that “urgent action must be taken to prevent the young jobless from becoming the young hopeless,” the BBC reports.

In 2012, suicide by active duty American soldiers exceeded the number of U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan. Why? In the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, young natives are lining up to become suicide bombers. Why?

Austerity has caused more than 10,000 suicides (including the married couple pictured above) and as many as 1 million additional cases of depression across Europe and the United States, economist David Stuckler and physician Sanjay Basu estimate. Those findings are discussed in their new book, “The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills.”

Since the Newtown massacre, visions of crazy mass killers and armed strangers in the night have colonized the American mind. But the danger out there is both more mundane and more terrible: You’re more likely to be hurt or killed by someone you know or love. And it would probably happen at home.

A lawyer for Aaron Swartz—the 26-year-old programmer and open-Internet activist who reportedly committed suicide Friday under pressure from threat of prosecution—says MIT refused to endorse a deal that would have granted Swartz probation or deferred prosecution.

Millions of Europeans are protesting spending cuts and tax increases during a continent-wide general strike that comes days after a 53-year-old woman in Spain committed suicide as she was about to be evicted.

After leveling off in 2010 and 2011, suicides by active-duty American troops have peaked at nearly one per day so far this year, with 154 lives taken in 155 days, far outstripping the number killed in action in Afghanistan during the same period.

Workers at a Chinese factory owned by the electronics manufacturer Foxconn threatened to leap from the roof of a building in Wuhan in a protest over wages and working conditions, echoing the tragedy of laborers who jumped to their deaths for similar reasons two years earlier at other company plants.

After 77-year-old Greek retiree Dimitris Christoulas fatally shot himself in front of the parliament building in Athens on Wednesday, Greek protesters’ ire again exploded over the austerity measures that the government has implemented to save the country from economic ruin while sacrificing citizens’ funds along the way.

On Oct. 3, 19-year-old U.S. Army Pvt. Danny Chen died of a gunshot wound to the head in southern Afghanistan. The Army initially called his death a suicide. The back story now involves eight of his fellow soldiers who allegedly subjected Chen to race-based hazing.

Three deaths in or near Occupy Wall Street encampments in different cities late last week have given authorities reason to insist that shutting the protests down is in the public’s best interest. (more)

A detainee accused of being an al-Qaida operative committed suicide in a Guantanamo Bay prison yard, U.S. officials say. His death brings the total number of Guantanamo “suicides” to six since the U.S. began sending foreign captives there in 2002. (more)

The death toll in protests against the four-decade-plus rule of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya is now more than 200 people, with 900 injured amid warnings from government media that anyone opposing the regime risked “suicide.”

The Army’s investment in suicide prevention appears to be paying off, with the first drop among active duty soldiers in five years. However the number of National Guardsmen and reservists who killed themselves—half of whom never saw combat—nearly doubled in the last year.

In a bloody beginning to the new year in Egypt, a suicide bombing outside a Coptic church in Alexandria killed at least 21 people and injured dozens more. “This massacre has al-Qaida written all over ... ,” a church official said.

Attacks on two Afghan military bases killed at least 13 members of the country’s security forces. One of the attacks, blamed on the Taliban, was against a training center on the outskirts of the capital, Kabul.

In this case, the writing is actually on the wall: Brooklyn-based artist Sebastian Errazuriz turned his shock over hearing that the number of U.S. troops who committed suicide in 2009 doubled the toll ... (continued)

Hong Kong-based electronics manufacturer Hon Hai is hitting back at new reports that working conditions at its Foxconn plants in China, where iPhones come from and where an employee suicide spree made news in recent months, haven’t gotten better.

You may have seen those “It Gets Better” spots in which earnest celebrities confront the problem of gay kids getting bullied. Well, here’s a spoof of that series that approaches the issue from a bully’s-eye point of view. Apparently, bigotry is no longer “fashionable.”

Carl Paladino has made a joke of the New York governor’s race, but on Sunday the tea party candidate showed he could be hateful as well. Speaking to a group of Orthodox Jews just days after it was reported that two teenagers and an adult were tortured nearby in the Bronx for being gay, Paladino said children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking homosexuality is “equally valid.” (continued)

An 18-year-old violinist at Rutgers University jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after posting a short note on Facebook. Two fellow students are accused of using a webcam to broadcast footage of the freshman having sex with another man.

Christopher Nolan’s epic and ambitious new blockbuster is a fascinating, skillfully made brain twister that gives Philip K. Dick a run for his existential money. But at the core of Nolan’s film is a troubling idea that won’t go away. (Spoilers!)

According to Yale historian David Blight, Memorial Day got its start at the end of the Civil War. 145 years after the end of our Civil War, our nation is engaged in near civil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which we had a part in starting and no plans for ending.

Although Terry Gou, chairman of the Taiwan-based electronics maker Foxconn, visited the suicide-plagued branch of his company in Shenzhen, China, on Wednesday in an attempt to get to the root of the ongoing tragedy, answers aren’t coming fast enough ... (continued)

Three suicide car-bombings rocked Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 30 people and injuring more than 200. The attacks, coming a day after the murder of 25 people in suburban Baghdad on Saturday, apparently targeted foreign diplomatic missions in the capital.